Broken Angels (47 page)

“Yes.”

The energy I'd seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she'd be all right. There'd been a point when I thought that she wasn't staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.

She'd be all right.

It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.

It felt like a scab coming off.

“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to Dig 27's shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust-colored swirling of the Wedge battlewagon's camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.

“Yeah?”

“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”

She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.

“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”

“Right.”

Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down toward the battlewagon and the long ride out.

EPILOGUE

The
Angin Chandra's Virtue
blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She's already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualize, but even that's pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she'll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She's not a deep-space vessel; she's not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she'll get where she's going in her own time.

Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji's contractors have done us proud. There's a shoreline in wind- and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water's edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sun-blasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five meters of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicolored fish down there, in among the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortifications.

The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there's enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoracion and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.

During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evening, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you're going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn't any night sky you'd see from the pilot deck of the
Angin Chandra's Virtue
right now—one of the contractors told me they've drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.

As afterlives go, it's not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect—not nearly restricted enough entry, for one thing—but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the
Tanya Wardani
are locked into. If the
Chandra
's deserted decks and corridors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it's an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.

But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them is interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.

Sutjiadi didn't make it, either. His stack was the only one I didn't turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn't know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.

Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they resleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I'm buying.

Sutjiadi.

Cruickshank.

Hansen.

Jiang.

Some would say we got off lightly.

Sometimes, when I'm sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whiskey, I almost agree.

•         •         •

Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly dressed construct modeled after a Hun Home Settlement years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft-top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She's rarely gone more than half an hour.

Of course in real time, that's a couple of days. Roespinoedji's contractors slowed the onboard virtuality down for us, about as far as it would go. It must have been some kind of a first for them: Most clients want virtual time running at tens or hundreds of times reality-standard. But then, most people don't have a decade and more with nothing better to do than sit around. We're living out the eleven-year transit in here at about a hundred times the speed it's really passing. Weeks on the
Chandra
's shadow-crewed bridge pass in hours for us. We'll be back in the Latimer system by the end of the month.

It really would have been easier to just sleep through it, but Carrera was no worse a judge of human nature than any of the other carrion birds gathered about the paralyzed body of Sanction IV. Like all vessels with potential to escape the war, the battlewagon is grudgingly equipped with a single emergency cryocap for the pilot. It isn't even a very good one: Most of Vongsavath's time away is taken up with the de- and refrosting time required by the overcomplex cryosystems. That Hun Home bureaucrat is an elaborate joke on Sun Liping's part, suggested and then written into the format when Vongsavath returned one evening spitting curses at the inefficiency of the cryocap's processor.

Vongsavath exaggerates, of course, the way you do about minor annoyances when life is so close to perfect in its major aspects. Most of the time she's not gone long enough for her coffee to get cold, and the systems checks she performs on the pilot deck have so far proved 100 percent superfluous. Nuhanovic guidance systems. Like Sun once said, in the hull of the Martian ship, they don't build the stuff any better than this.

I mentioned that comment to her a couple of days ago as we lay floating on our backs in the long aquamarine swells out beyond the headland, eyes slitted against the sun overhead. She could barely remember saying it. Everything that happened on Sanction IV is already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. In the afterlife, you lose track of time, it seems, or maybe you just no longer have the need or desire to keep track. Any one of us could find out from the virtuality datahead how long we've been gone, when exactly we'll arrive, but it seems none of us wants to. We prefer to keep it vague. Back on Sanction IV, we know, years have already passed, but exactly how many seems—and probably is—irrelevant. The war may already be over, the peace already being fought over. Or it may not. It's hard to make it matter more than that. The living do not touch us here.

For the most part, anyway.

Occasionally, though, I wonder what Tanya Wardani might be doing by now. I wonder if she is already out on the edges of the Sanction system somewhere, turning the face of some new sleeve, tired and intent as she pores over the glyph locks on a Martian dreadnought. I wonder how many other deadwired hulks there are spinning around out there, whirling up to trade fire with their ancient enemies and then falling away injured into the night again, machines creeping out to soothe and repair and make ready for the next time. I wonder what else we're going to come across in those unexpectedly crowded skies, once we start looking. And then, occasionally, I wonder what they were all doing there in the first place. I wonder what they were fighting for in the space around that nondescript little star and I wonder if in the end they thought it was worth it.

Even more occasionally, I turn my mind to what I have to do when we do get to Latimer, but the detail seems unreal. The Quellists will want a report. They'll want to know why I couldn't twist Kemp closer to their designs for the whole Latimer sector, why I changed sides at the critical moment, and worst of all why I left things no better aligned than they were when they needlecast me in. It's probably not what they had in mind when they hired me.

I'll make something up.

I don't have a sleeve right now, but that's a minor inconvenience. I've got half a share in twenty million U.N. dollars banked in Latimer City, a small gang of hardened spec ops friends, one of whom boasts blood connection to one of the more illustrious military families on Latimer. A psychosurgeon to find for Sutjiadi. A bad-tempered determination to visit the Limon Highlands and give Yvette Cruickshank's family the news of her death. Beyond that, a vague idea that I might go back to the silver-grassed ruins of Innenin and listen intently for some echo of what I found on the
Tanya Wardani.

These are my priorities when I get back from the dead. Anyone who has a problem with them can line right up.

In some ways, I'm looking forward to the end of the month.

This afterlife shit is overrated.

Virginia Cottinelli

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R
ICHARD
K. M
ORGAN
always wanted to travel and write. He managed to get the traveling part down long before the writing part came. Following graduation from Queens' College, Cambridge University, Morgan moved to London, where he states that his dreams of being a successful novelist were “cut down to size.” Morgan says, “About the only worthwhile thing I did in London that year was cultivate a taste for Thai and Japanese cuisine, Jack Daniels on ice, and Islay single malts. None of which I could really afford. It was time to leave.” After four weeks of training as an English language teacher, he found himself in Istanbul. Then it was back to London, then Madrid, and finally Glasgow, where he secured a university post. Fourteen years after his initial foray to London, his first novel,
Altered Carbon,
was purchased for publication. Shortly thereafter, Hollywood optioned the book for the movies. He is now a happy, full-time writer with the means to write and travel when he wants to (which is usually).
Broken Angels
is his second published novel.

By Richard K. Morgan

Altered Carbon

More praise for Richard K. Morgan's
ALTERED CARBON

•         •         •

“Rousing . . . If you've ever wondered what kind of science fiction Raymond Chandler might have written for a futuristic Philip Marlowe, check out
Altered Carbon
.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Gritty and vivid . . . Readers will become attached to reluctant hero Kovacs. . . . Looks like we have another interstellar hero on our hands.”

—
USA Today

“This seamless marriage of hardcore cyberpunk and hard-boiled detective tale is an astonishing first novel.”

—
The Times
(London)

“An astonishing piece of work . . . A wonderful sf idea . . .
Altered Carbon
hits the floor running and then starts to accelerate. Intriguing and inventive in equal proportions and refuses to let go until the last page.”

—P
ETER
H
AMILTON

“An exciting sf/crime hybrid, with an intricate (but always plausible) plot, a powerful noir atmosphere, and enough explosive action to satisfy the most die-hard thriller fan.”

—SF Site

“Carbon-black noir with drive and wit, a tight plot, and a back-story that leaves the reader wanting a sequel like another fix.”

—Ken M
C
L
EOD

“Exciting . . . Addictive . . .

This is a ceaseless, permanently off-balance sprint through an all-too-grimly-familiar future where miraculous technologies are degraded through everyday use and abuse. There are occasional throwaway mentions of background details here that beg entire novels on their own; ubiquitous pieces of history dismissed in single lines that had my nose twitching, scenting something far bigger lurking, hidden under the surface. If Richard Morgan can use these to even come close to repeating the harsh triumph of
Altered Carbon
in his next novel then I would suggest we have another bona fide UK sf triumph on our hands. Go and get yourself a copy of
Altered Carbon
now, if only to forestall other people telling you how much you need to read this book.”

—
Infinity Plus

“
Altered Carbon
is a really impressive debut, an auspicious start to what will be an ongoing series. I look forward to seeing more from this talented author.”

—SF Site

“A marvelous updating of Marlowe film noir . . . Morgan comes up with a twist on the soul-as-software idea that's both original and effective. . . . All the disturbing implications of the big sf idea are worked through to their conclusions, and there's some subtle musings on the true nature of identity hidden away beneath the enjoyable surface of the tale.”

—
Starburst

“First-rate . . . A mystery that could only derive from its particular sf setting, and one that validates this setting not by opening it up, but by enriching its texture and, like some Chandler and a bit more Hammett, revealing ever-deepening layers of corruption and ever more sinister characters.”

—
Locus

“Excellent . . . Set to become one of the genre's major publishing highlights of the year. One of the most impressive debuts the genre has ever seen.”

—
Outland
magazine

“A dazzling debut . . .

An excellent, no-holds-barred, fast-paced thriller with a strong central character and plenty of betrayals, twists, shocks, and action.”

—
Dreamwatch

“Richard Morgan has just written the first great cyberpunk novel of the twenty-first century. This new author is going to be stunningly, nay amazingly, big.”

—SFCrowsnest

“An exhilarating and glossy adventure . . . What makes
Altered Carbon
a winner is the quality of Morgan's prose. For every piece of John Woo action there is a stunning piece of reflective description, a compelling sense of place, and abundant 24-karat witticisms.”

—
SFX
magazine

“A wonderful novel . . . Its credentials as a detective story are impeccable, fair puzzle and all, and that's in a universe where minds can be shifted from body to body!”

—L
ARRY
N
IVEN

“Breathtakingly visionary and seductively credible . . . Morgan explodes an endless stream of fascinating ideas about how our present technologies may evolve. . . . It is a world so rich in detail that it's inconceivable for there not to be a run of sequels starring Takeshi Kovacs, a classic noir hero, slicing his way through the pulsing, corrupted, gloriously cancerous mess of it all.”

—
New Straits Times Press
(Malaysia)

•         •         •